[Atlantium]

Alex Jones is free to express his speech on his own website as much as he pleases. "Free Speech" is not about forcing a company to host content they don't like. That would be against Twitter's freedoms. Alex Jones will still be heard by his audience.

[nyolfen]

maybe you haven’t noticed, but people have been going after hosting companies and payment processors lately to shut down people they find politically disagreeable. we are increasingly less and less free to host our own speech.

[LocalH]

Every bit of it is done under the assumption that "freedom of speech only applies to the government", which is quite technically true. However, I don't really see how it would have been possible for the authors of the Constitution (since Twitter is a US company, and Alex Jones is a US citizen, it's within scope) to foresee that the greatest danger to freedom of speech would not be the government.

Honestly, we're probably at the point in our existence as a nation where we have the least freedom of speech. Sure, you can sit in a private conversion and say pretty much whatever you want. But, if you speak anywhere where the public can see it (even via private means), and you have an unpopular opinion, you have droves of people who try to shut you down. And it's not bad enough that they can get your access to your platform of choice revoked, some of these people will make it their life's mission to ensure that you lose your job or even worse become unemployable.

Look at what happened to Conor Daly after something his father said ten years prior to Conor's birth surfaced.

I'm waiting for the day when someone legitimately tries to argue that the rights of all of those descended from the Pilgrims should be taken away, since they took away the rights and land of Native Americans.

[TheDong]

> Honestly, we're probably at the point in our existence as a nation where we have the least freedom of speech

I think McCarthyism would like to have a word with you.

People have always been persecuted socially for socially unacceptable beliefs. If you said "I want to eat babies" 100 years ago, your friends wouldn't associate with you, just as they wouldn't now.

100 years ago you could say "I think people of the same gender as me are attractive" or "I wanna do it in the butt" and also be persecuted by your friends, though now both of those phrases are unlikely to see you condemned.

You can say more total things today without being persecuted I posit, however social persecution has been made into a far more public affair with the advent of social media and the 24/7 for-profit news cycle.

I think your speech is more free, but we hear more stories of social consequences due to the nature of news and social media, which creates biases and persecution complexes.

I admit I don't have numbers and facts to back it up, but neither do you have any evidence for your argument.

[LocalH]

Today, it seems we're approaching (if we're not already in) McCarthyism II. Except instead of being a top down thing, it's community-perpetrated. How many others have been silenced from major platforms that people don't know about because they're not as (in)famous as Alex Jones? I don't know, and I'd wager (a small amount) that you don't either.

The effects of that persecution are completely different. Sure, in the past you were more likely to be physically attacked for certain socially unacceptable beliefs. But nowadays, you're more likely to suffer long-term damage if you speak too controversially without taking great pains to hide your real identity, and even if you do the people who you anger with your speech may attempt to dox you anyway.

It's funny (in the sad way) that there are so many people of all types who will use certain "weasel" tactics themselves, but when their opponents use the same tactics, they scream "that's wrong, that's unfair, that's dirty". Almost like "the ends don't justify the means" has been perverted into "the ends justify the means only towards my opponents but never towards me".

I don't have evidence, no. But that's because this is a casual discussion for me.

[nyolfen]

100 years ago, hordes of strangers couldn't ruin your medium- or long-term future from afar for those things

[threeseed]

Then run your own hosting company and accept money via Bitcoin.

You can't just force third party companies to do whatever you want.

[0x4f3759df]

I don't see why he can't just terraform Mars and built his own Internet and Twitter there.

[nyolfen]

hate speech and racism absolutely are political, they are only outside of the overton window. i despise racists as much as anyone but i don’t trust anyone with the authority to police permissible opinions, and i think anybody who does is naive and short-sighted. if you construct these frameworks for suppression, they will be used against you by your enemies the second they have the opportunity.

[nyolfen]

just realized i replied to the wrong comment, apologies

[0x4f3759df]

Hate speech is a phony political category. Hate Christians and white people? Well that's just fine. Have a Twitter account that retweets verified people saying 'kill all whites'? That'll get you banned.

[TheDong]

> shut down people they find politically disagreeable

It's not that. Hate-speech is not political. Racism is not political. Morality is not all that political.

Shutting down someone who denies shootings and is abusive to the victim's families and spews racism is not a political move.

People should condemn disgusting hate speech regardless of their political affiliation.

[nyolfen]

hate speech and racism absolutely are political, they are only outside of the overton window. i despise racists as much as anyone but i don’t trust anyone with the authority to police permissible opinions, and i think anybody who does is naive and short-sighted. if you construct these frameworks for suppression, they will be used against you by your enemies the second they have the opportunity.

[boxspam]

I hate how Xi Jinping is running China so strictly. The Russian Apartment Bombings was an inside job. Westerners should have no business in the Middle East.

[starik36]

That's like saying: Alex Jones is free to grow his own food on his land as much as he pleases. This supermarket has a policy not to sell food to people who violate our terms of service regarding hate speech.

[henryfjordan]

The supermarket is free to not sell to any particular person on the basis that they constantly engage in hate speech.

It gets murkier when they start banning classes of people or ban someone for something that puts them in a protected class, but any supermarket that banned Alex Jones for hate speech would be well within their rights.

[starik36]

Ok, let's take it one step further. All the supermarkets in town decide not to sell food to Alex Jones, essentially condemning him to starvation. Are you still good with that?

[Atlantium]

Exactly. You may not like that but that's the way it is.

[enraged_camel]

If you go into a supermarket and constantly harass people, you will not only get banned, but probably arrested as well.

[fuball63]

It isn't unreasonable for a supermarket to forbid someone that is disturbing the peace from entering.

[TheDong]

If you go into a supermarket and start spewing hate-speech, yes they have every right to ban you.

If you make other customers uncomfortable, they have every right to expel you.

Alex Jones is spewing hate-speech on twitter, making other twitter users feel unwelcome, and so on.

I don't see how this analogy is favorable to him at all. If you're abusive in a space to the point of causing mental pain to others, yes, you should be removed from it.

[boxspam]

> Alex Jones will still be heard by his audience.

Current audience. What about a new young audience? What about the part of the audience that wants to listen to him on Twitter?

> That would be against Twitter's freedoms.

I think you should be able to fire your users for being assholes. But I do realize the slippery slope here. I could discriminate on race, political preference, smell, weight, sexuality, age, etc. and that causes me to label someone an asshole.

Now Twitter, the biggest public and digital town square of our future, labels you an asshole, but does not specify exactly why. The global media town crier goes around town telling everyone you are now the new village idiot. Even if you vehemently agree with their decision, this should give you pause: How could such a system be hacked by adversaries/what vulnerabilities are exposed? How much unchecked social/tribal power is held in the hands of the few? What would such a system look like if it is artificially/clumsily converged to a majority opinion ideology chamber? Then, will you still be heard by your audience if you have a dissenting/unpopular/asshole opinion? Not too long ago "homosexuality is not a mental disorder" was an unpopular opinion. Do you trust our current evolution enough to say: "We are there. We can now freeze our morals and views."

[marcrosoft]

I completely agree with you. I'm just saying that it must be a hard decision because they've previously chosen what to censor in the past giving them a censorship bias. We now know twitter is not a place of free speech but a place with the slant of X.

[trophycase]

Jack Dorsey frequently said in the hearing that he wanted Twitter to be like a "public square" or "public forum". In fact he used the word "public" quite a bit, which is weird if you don't want to be regulated.